After getting a fair number of e-mails asking me more details about the Ikariam PLUS option, I finally decided to give in and buy some Ambrosia to test this feature out.

I went for the easiest and cheapest buy - 100 for £7.99. A re-log later and I got 100 Ambrosia in my Ikariam account!The Ikariam premium features are very well structured on the chart on this page.

You have the option to buy the advisers individually and each of them cost 6 Ambrosia per 7 days. The advisors individually only cost 5 Ambrosia but you also get charged 1 for the ‘Overview’ cost. I have covered what each advisor offers extra in my Ikariam PLUS introductory post so be sure to read that if you are unsure!

And here are all the euphoric faces that appear after you spend your hard earned Ambrossia to hire the advisers :

Depending on which advisors you buy, they will also appear more luxuriously dressed! I got all four so this is what mine now look like:

This is also one of the features I like about this game. Even though it’s in beta and there are lots of bugs, as you progress through, a lot of the interface changes along depending on the stage you are at!

In this mini guide I will cover 5 sections:

1. Towns Overview
2. Military Overview
3. Research Overview
4. Diplomacy Overview
5. Trader

Ikariam Towns Overview

The towns overview provides you with a summary of

• your total citizens,
• free citizens,
• workers and
• researchers,
• level of hapiness in each of your colonies!

It also provides quick access to the colonies - by simply clicking on their name will take you to the town view.

The other tabs in Towns Overview window show you all the resources you have and all buildings you have built in all your colonies, providing their expansion level as well.

Ikariam Military Overview

The Ikariam military overview is one of the most helpful as it shows you three things

1. Number of troops and the type stationed in each of your colonies
2. Cost per hour for each of your troops/ colonies
3. Total Cost

The army is divided into Units and Ships by the tabs at the top of the page.

Ikariam Research Overview

The Ikariam Research summary screen shows you:

1. Academy Level in each of your colonies
2. Scientists employed
3. Cost per day
4. Total Scientists across your whole empire working on research
5. Research Points needed to complete the current research (sidebar)

Ikariam Diplomacy Overview

In the Diplomacy summary window you get an overview of all the active spies that are currently on a mission.

It shows you:

• the town they are in,
• what their last mission was,
• risk % and
• provides you with a link to the Hideout where you can re-assign the spies.

Ikariam Trader

The last thing that you can do with the Ambrosia at the moment is to exchange resources. You can call the ‘Trader’ for which you pay 3 Ambrosia and you get these rates:

• Building material : luxury resources in a 2 : 1 ratio
• Luxury resources : different luxury resources 1 : 1 ratio

I hope this mini walkthrough the Ikariam premium features answered some of your questions or doubts you may have. As always, if you’re unsure about something leave a comment and I’ll try to get back to you! Feel free to link to the guide!

Anyway, here’s a technique that is not limited to Ikariam and is used to make easy money in-game without too much effort. For example, take a look at the screenshots below:

Buy Crystal Screen:

Sell Crystal Screen:

So basically, you can buy 1,500 crystal from those two people in the first screen for 20g each = 30,000. You can then sell these to the people in the second screenshots who are buying them for 30-35g each to get 51,500 gold for 1400 of them! That’s a net profit of 21,500 gold from this single transaction!

Why does it work? 

It works because a lot of people don’t realize the potential, don’t fully understand how the game trade mechanics work, can’t be bothered to search for the resource they want/ sell.

This was just an example of how you can use this but almost all of the time you can take advantage of this technique to make a profit. Sometimes you won’t make 21,000 gold from a single transaction as such opportunities are rare but even if you make 5,000 it still is something in Ikariam!

Also remember that this technique works for every game that has a market/ auction house. World of Warcraft is another perfect example when I used to play the game I made 90% of my money from this technique.

Anyways, this is the tip for today - now open your market window and see what real bargains you can find .

The Ikariam Plus advisers cost 5 ambrosia for 7 days hire! You can pay via Paypal, credit card, phone call, SMS, moneybookers, paysafecard, bank transfer/ electronic transfer, Wallie-card depending on the country you live in and you can buy 1,000, 400 or 100 Ambrosia. Here are the prices in Euros, below:

These three units are the basis of your defense at the start of the game. Later on, the phalanx can get replaced by steamgiants and the ballista ships by catapult ships but if you’ve only started Ikariam 3 or 4 days ago you wouldn’t have gotten to that stage yet as it can take weeks if not months.

The prime mistake new people do is they expand their port like crazy seeing how little resources they use, thinking it might help them in the long run or simply because they can’t build anything else. Well, the first trick to being supreme in defense is keeping the level of your trading port to 1. If you’ve already upgraded it, downgrade it by selecting demolish.

Secondly, build two or even three Balista ships and keep them constantly in your Ikariam town’s port. If someone sends over a trading ship they will get turned back by these ships. This means they will then have to blockade your port and send over at least the same number of ships you have and of a higher level. For example, 2 flameships per 2 Balista ships. This is costly, requires high level of research and time consuming (3h+ at least). If you haven’t been spied on and the player saw that pillaging you would totally be worth it, he would just give up after his trading ships returned.

Okay, so we have a level 1 port, three Balista ships and now we need soldiers - Phalanxes! This is the second line of defense. At this level 15 phalanx continuously on defense ’stance’ in your town will render all attacks worthless.
The phalanx is the best unit for defense in Ikariam assuming the upkeep costs and defence bonus. Steamgiants are the next step up from phalanx but they are months away in the research time line!

The third unit that will help you keep the enemies away are the spies! An expanded hideout of 4+ and the same number of spies on defense status will provide more than adequate protection against most spies and players who would want to attack you at this level (remember, I’m talking about 3-8 with medium scores).

Remember it is also important that your town wall is at least the same level as your town hall to provide the best defense bonus in Ikariam it can offer.

I have a small army - 5 phalanx constantly in defense, 20 slingers, 4 swordsman and 14 trade ships

So how did I win all my battles? Well, the tool I’m loving at the moment and I use constantly is the Ikariam Score Search Tool. This tool displays the total score, military score, gold score and it also tells you whether the selected town has any allies.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a town with a military score of 0 has no army whatsoever, that including war ships so you needn’t worry about having to blockade the port first - you can send in 2 slingers and they will pillage it without any problems.

So what I did was pick an island with the resource I want and preferably one that has the wonder that increases the resource gained as this way I know the towns will have a lot of the resource stored. Then check each town between level 3 and 7 to see its army and total score. A town with a total score of 300+ and military score of 0 is what you should aim for. The total score may mean that the port level is higher than 1 (most people new to the game just upgrade their port thinking it will help them and only later realize their mistake), therefore the higher the score the better the target. This means you can just send in 2 or 3 slingers and return with a full shipment of goods!

Sometimes you will only get 200 wood and maybe 10-20 of the Ikariam luxury resource but other times you might get 1k+ wood and 300-400 of the resource depending on how many trade ships you have available at home which is another important part. A little investment into 10+ ships will pay off in a matter of hours if this technique is used correctly. However, it is important to remember that I have not once been in loss - sending 2-3 slingers will cost 400 gold at most. Therefore, even if you only get 40 wood back which is very unlikely you still won’t loose money. On the other hand, if you would have to blockade the port first then launch your own army you could very well be into thousands of gold spent which is risky unless you’ve used a spy beforehand.

Okay so those are the steps to getting your first pillages if you are new to the game and don’t have huge amounts of resources. Nonetheless after you’ve raised 3 colonies, got a town level of 12+ and a larger army you may want to move and attack larger cities so you get more resources per pillage if this method begins to bore you. But by that time you will have the combat experience in Ikariam!

Now that you got the resources at home, learn how to build the ultimate defense in Ikariam so players you pillaged can’t revenge on you!

After you buy Ambrosia, four extra, different premium advisors will show up:

1. 20% more Advisor for each Luxury Good: this feature will allow 20% more of each, marble, crystal glass, wine and sulphur. If you wanted all of them, you would have to buy all but otherwise you can choose them individually.
2. 5% more Ikariam Building Materials Advisors: buying the advisors will give you 20% more building material.
3. Empire View: New view, amongst the other three (city, island and world) which lists buildings levels and the number of tropps stationed in each of your colonies.
4. Merchant: The merchant is used for trading in the Ambrosia for luxury goods. For example, you call it the merchant which will buy your marble for example and then trade it into a different luxury good. The ratio is 1:1 for luxury goods and 1:2 for luxury goods : building materials - pretty reasonable.

These premium features have been introduced in Ikariam on the test servers a while ago and are expected to soon be available on the live realms.

A museum is useful because as with the tavern, it increase the growth rate of your town. The higher the growth rate, the quicker your population will increase and as each citizen makes 4 gold per hour, the more money you make - simply huh ?

Requirements

It’s not easy to reach the stage where you can build a museum. First of all, you need to research the following:

Sea Faring: Deck Weapons, Ship Maintenance, Expansion
Economy: Conservation, Pulley, Wealth, Wine Press, Culinary Specialties
Science: Well Digging, Paper, Espionage, Invention, Ink, Cultural Exchange
Military: Dry Dock, Maps, Professional Army
(more…)

I don’t think there are any fixes at the moment but it’s not much to worry about anyway. If you made an Ikariam video and would like for it to be posted on the site, please contact me!

There is only one other circumstance in which it could be useful to change your capital. For example, if you don’t need any resources from your starting island and would rather move it to somewhere else so you don’t have to move the resources gathered in other cities to your capital all the time.

To move the capital you first need to colonize another island which means building a palace on this island. It’s important to note that building a new colony and palace is not cheap. A level one palace will cost about 600 wood whereas the sole founding of the colony costs 1250 wood, 12k gold, 40 citizens and 5 transport ships. To find out what more you need to found a new colony in Ikariam and how exactly to do it, read the How To Form A Colony In Ikariam Guide.

In order for you to change capital successfully, you need to upgrade your palace level in the colony to the same level or higher than your current capital.

NOTE: Your old palace (old capital) will get destroyed and you will loose all the resources from that city in Ikariam so make sure you ship all the resources over to your new capital city first!